You likely don’t realize it, but whenever you talk about issues of “right” and “wrong,” you are at least “bi-lingual,” and often “tri-lingual.” Just as many Americans unconsciously and fluidly slip between speaking English and Spanish in a linguistic hybrid, most of us intermix at least three “cultural languages” when expressing our views on morality and the law. [1] I… Read more »
The refugee crisis on the southern U.S. border confirms to me how impotent religion is in addressing the most pressing social and moral problems of our day, taking a back seat to political ideology and innate human “fear of the other.” The current administration’s policies of child separation, indeterminate detention, and harsh detention conditions for people convicted of no crime… Read more »
In a prior post I looked at the “infinitesimal phenomenon” in gun violence occurrences, where the closer you look for “the one cause” of any gun event, the more it slips away. Yet, in aggregate and over time, the causes are clearly real. In this continuation, we’ll look at why gun violence statistics are so constant over time, or if… Read more »
Despite being an advocate for serious gun law reform, I do have to say that there is one approach from my fellow advocates that often fails upon examination, and the “2A” defenders like to make hay of it. A lot of media attention is directed at “one cause” propositions like “mental health” or particular registration laws. But upon examination of… Read more »
Whenever I review the updated numbers from the excellent Gun Violence Archive project, I am struck by the unrelenting “randomness with predictability,” in effect the cruelest of lotteries, that are the rates of gun violence casualties in the United States. You just don’t find any numbers like these anywhere else in the developed world. And note how little these per-day… Read more »